Real Men Drink Afternoon Coffee Part II: Stop Cultivating Failure

My last blog was a challenge to the social norms of men in our culture, in how they view their day. However, it was mostly applicable for men who are already married.
However, the central principle in this blog will be the same. How do you view your day? Is it about pushing through the dreary, boring, stressful parts to arrive at the ‘oasis’ of personal gratification? Or are our days lived out in faithfully seeking to serve others as God leads?
    I started at marriage because in many ways, that is the easy one. Most people would not balk at the idea that a Christian man must be prepared to serve his wife and family when he comes in the door at night. However, the single man is a different story. Try convincing a young single man, even a Christian young single man, that they ought to fill their single evenings and weekends with serving others. Again, I’d like to go to the word of God to start this conversation.

1 Cor 7:32-34a
“I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.”

    I may not be going, at this point, where you think I am going. Most may know that most often this verse is used to help singles to be content in their singleness, while inadvertently sending them into a pit of depression.
    No, rather I want us to notice what is missing from this verse. Paul puts men into two categories: those who are married and worried about worldly things, and those who are single about focused only on the Lord. There is no category for those who are single and, ‘anxious about worldly things’.
    But how many of us single guys could honestly say, “Yep, that’s what I’m going to miss about being single: having all of my time committed to the Lord (serving others and contemplative time)”? That definitely has not been my experience hanging out with single guys. Single, Christian men are by and large about balancing out making enough money for themselves, and having enough free time for themselves. Some will work more, some will spend time on themselves more, but generally, that is the time split: money for me, and time for me (or doing school for me, so I can make money for me).
    Underneath this selfish lifestyle is an ideology that few would seriously admit to believing, but few, if any, of us single males are exempt from: “I’m single now, so I should enjoy it while I can”. This is not Biblical. This is not God honouring, and what it does, is cultivate marital failure.    
    Those single men who enjoy non-stop evenings of hanging out with other singles, video games, movies, etc., confess by their actions that they somehow believe that their spouse will be the catalyst the breaks open the time-hardened dam of selfishness, and let loose a flood of self-denying affection and service. Please.
    If we stop and think about it for a second, we know, that just like any other un-fleshly quality, it must be cultivated. This cannot be done without the work of the Spirit of God in our lives, but I would submit to you that if there was ever a generation of men who were exceptionally gifted at quenching the Spirit of God in regards to His prompting to live for others, and to spend time with God, it is our generation.
    Please think about this illustration. Imagine that at whenever point you started to be interested in girls, God led you outside to a patch of tilled ground and said to you: “I want you to tend this garden until you get married. The healthier the garden is when you get married, the better your marriage will be”. As the soft-hearted meditate on this, they will recognize that there have been some painful weeds that have made their way into that garden over the course of our lives. Pornography. Financial folly. Cowardice. They are weeds in that garden and we know it, and we hate it, and we are doing what we can to get them out of their.
    But I want you to understand that this attitude of, “I’m single now, so I should enjoy it while I can,” is not just, staying with the garden illustration, going inside and playing video games while the garden goes to the birds. It is actively planting weeds in your garden. It is intentionally making your garden worse than it would be even if you just left it alone.
    Now, I don’t want to set up your future wife as the idol that causes you to make every good decision in your life. The glory of Christ ought to be the highest motivation (among others), and if it isn’t, that is another big weed that we don’t have time to deal with here. But what I am saying is that if you seriously want to get married, you need to start to cultivate a successful marriage today.
    So what would it look like if single guys started acting like they were married, in preparation for marriage? Well, for starters, more evenings committed either to the service of others, or to contemplative time with Jesus. Money managed in such a way that once needs were met and savings set aside, it was not a free-for-all. Practically, this could mean a lot. If you work eight hours a day, and make a descent wage where you are able to put away savings and be generous to others, then I would say you should look to the church. Use your time and income to serve the bride of Christ until you have your own bride and those resources become more limited. If you have an eight hour job and it does not pay well enough to put anything into savings or allow you to be generous, or pay your debts, then this life style might look like working 10 to 12 hours a day to make sure your debts are paid off, and/or you are saving for marriage/being generous with your money. I cannot cover all the possibilities. I would start by asking a wise, godly, married man what it might look like to use your time and resources in a way that cultivates selfLESSness, and not selfishness. Ask him how many ‘singleness habits’ he had to break when he got married, and if you dare, ask him how he spent his free time when he was single (this question will likely be more devastating depending on how old the man who chose to ask is).
    As a final word, I’m not saying that we can never go out to a movie or hang out with friends again. But our rest should be intentional. Isn’t that we want? Lives that are intentional instead of following fleeting desires? Intentional rest means finding those things that restore you in order to get you healthy to serve, rather than just trying to strike the balance between working enough to get enough money to have fun when your not working. This is also something that is extremely difficult without someone older and wiser guiding you.
    Let us all humbly seek the Lord on how we can further abandon the lies and idols of this culture that are destroying our marriages and families, and let us cultivate a loving, healthy, God honouring marriage today. I’m praying for you.

Real Men Drink Afternoon Coffee

While I realize that there are a multitude of reasons for men to have their coffee thing in the morning, I would submit that in general, the reason is that the perception is that the biggest challenge of the day is at the beginning.

Getting through the haze of sleep, the onslaught of thoughts detailing the vast, waterless expanse of the work day. But there is something else that the preferred hour of caffeine intake gives away: that the dying hours of the day are the least important ones.

Almost like the day is seen as a big hill that is to be ascend on a bicycle. As 2:00 rolls around, it changes from a moderate climb, to a flat path, and on to a decline around 4:30 (roughly based on a 9-5 work day).

In other words, the general consensus of males in North America is that the time of focus, exertion and effort ceases as they arrive at home. As if eight hours is all that should ever be expected of a man in a 24 hour period.

This attitude is ravaging the homes of North America, and not just secular homes. Christian homes as well. So many men looking at the work they do as the testing ground for their character and strength. All the while ignoring the fact that (I would argue) Biblically, the primary place the Lord shapes a man’s character is in the home.

I’m not saying that we ignore our attitudes and the opportunities to learn and grow in the workplace. God knows, most of us could use some improvement in our workplace. What I am saying is that if you have the respect and admiration of everyone at work, and your house and home is a place of conflict and turmoil, you’ve lost.

What does the Word say?

Let’s look at the qualifications of an overseer, or elder in the church.

“He (the overseer) must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?”

1 Timothy 3:4-5 (ESV)

It may not be immediately apparent that this verse essentially teaches that the primary place God uses to shape a man’s character is in the home. But what is this verse clearly implying? What is it anticipating?

It is clearly anticipating that there will be men, who will be considered for eldership, that have everything cool and collected at church, but their home is a mess. Furthermore, those men are not to be ordained as elders.

And the Bible is simply clarifying something that we all know, albeit with reference to the relatively small category of elders: people, especially men, are great at putting on a front during the work day, but not so good at putting on a front at home.

here is just one example of how it works out:

One of the beautiful things about women, is you can’t hide from them. The old adage, ‘If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say nothing at all,’ tends not to work with women. Women are not satisfied with men who ‘don’t say nothing at all’ (and they ought not be satisfied). You cannot be a man who says nothing to his wife, and his children, and feel as though you’ve done your job and spared your family from whatever negativity you have cultivated in your heart. You haven’t done your job, you have failed.

Serving our families means fighting sin by meditating on the cross, and brining our hearts to a place of worship and joy before we walk in the door in the evening. And that will lead to a life-speaking husband and father. That is why Paul tells Timothy: “you want to see what a man is made of? Look at his family.”

Perhaps the verse that brings this together is simply,

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her,”

Ephesians 5:25

How does Christ love the church? Does He allow the offenses and wounds that He suffered diminish the purity and selflessness of His actions toward her? Does He respond to the church well when the church loves Him well, and is indignant or withdrawn when He feels He has been disrespected or misunderstood? I could go on, and in fact, in our meditations, we MUST go on. Go on until your soul is helped.

Yes we will fail, but I truly believe that we set ourselves up for failure when we perceive the hours that require our greatest performance between 9 and 5. So where do you put your emphasis in the day? Is it trying to push through the morning? Or do you REALLY get down to business as you walk through that door at night?

What would the homes of our nation look like if the husbands and fathers relegated the bulk of their emotional and physical vitality for the hours AFTER work? What cancerous seeds are planted by an entitled man walking through the door like Mr. Banks from Mary Poppins:

"I run my home precisely on schedule
At 6:01, I march through my door
My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02
Consistent is the life I lead!

...It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion
Are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed
And so I'll pat them on the head
And send them off to bed
Ah! Lordly is the life I lead!"

So perhaps some of us ought to pass by that first cup of coffee in the morning, and start a routine of afternoon coffee.

Next time: what if I’m a single guy?

Is it Biblical to ‘Surrender’?

If you haven’t noticed, there is quite a bit of ‘surrender’ language in the church. Popular worship songs admonish us to, “surrender all,” “surrender all to You,” and “wave our white flag,” (All songs I personally enjoy by the way). I don’t think you have to be a Freudian psychoanalyst to see that this is representing something about the way we see sanctification: the process by which we become holier, more mature Christians.


Some people may be surprised to know that not one time in the new testament, does Paul, Jesus, Peter, or anyone else encourage the Christian to ‘surrender’(see footnote 1).

I have seen the fruit of a passive approach to sanctification in the teaching of people I have looked up to over the years as well. On one occasion, the leader of our young adults group taught from the armor of God text in Ephesians 6, that with our armor, we are not supposed to fight, but only to ‘stand’. “Put on the whole armor...that you may be able to stand...” (Eph 6:11) Reading the next verse would have showed him that we do indeed ‘wrestle’.

On another occasion, I was enthusiastically sharing some insights from a book on sanctification with a pastor, and he too saw the Christian life as one of ‘surrendering’ rather than one of battle or work.

Going back to the Bible, in the absence of the word surrender, we have words and phrases like this: “put to death” (Romans 8:13), “fight the good fight” (Tim 6:12), “strive” (Luke 13:24), “run the race” “discipline my body” (1 Cor 9:24-27), and on and on I could go (see footnotes 2).

So am I advocating that we go on a crusade to rid our music and preaching of this word?

No.

I believe this word is an imperfect attempt to communicate two good concepts or principles of Christianity:

First, it speaks of an abandonment of our efforts to be right with God, and receive the grace of Jesus Christ: His death in our place for our sins, and the gift of His righteousness. That is a good concept.

Secondarily, I think it refers to the concept expressed by Galatians 3:2-3:

“Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”

In other words, there IS an aspect to Christian sanctification that you COULD say is a surrendering of our fleshly desires to our spiritual ones. To fill this out, one more place where the concept of surrender is exemplified in scripture. Romans 6:2:

“How can we who died to sin still live in it?”

It is a bit of a stretch, but I believe that the concept of ‘dying’ has been reinterpreted as ‘surrendering’. So perhaps the concept is somewhat in the Bible.

So what is my problem, why do I bring it up at all?

Because I believe the term, ‘surrender’ must be carefully qualified by church leaders before being accepted wholesale into the framework of sanctification.

Think with me about the person who is trying to quit smoking, or taking second looks at girls, or who is feeling as though they must offer a particularly humbling apology, and the word the have ringing in their ears is, “just surrender”. I suppose some people might come to the right conclusion, but I’m willing to wager that most Christians will take that to mean, “Smoke the cigarette, check out the girl, and don’t apologize”.

What I’m saying is that we have to let people know that this surrender will likely be hard. Really hard. Most of us have felt the lure of the flesh, and have felt as though the Spirit needs to speak up a bit at times. So yes, we are surrendering to our spiritual desires, we are surrendering to the will of God, but it will not be easy. It will often be hard, it will often be painful, it will take work, effort, striving, and all of that.

Let’s get our surrendering right.

1 NIV uses the word ‘surrender’ once in Luke 23:25 “He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, the one they asked for, and surrendered Jesus to their will.” This word is ‘paradiomi’ which is more commonly translated, ‘to deliver or give over’. 


2 Kevin Deyoung, The Hole in Our Holiness (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), 88